Adobe Announces "Full" Flash Player for Mobile: iPhone ETA TBA

At Mobile World Congress in Barcelona today, Adobe took the wrapper off a real for-real version of their desktop Flash player designed (and hopefully optimized) for mobile devices like the iPhone. Well, technically they took the wrappers off the wrappers, since Flash Mobile won't ship until the end of 2009 on its current schedule, and it won't support the iPhone even then, only Windows Phone 6.5 (are we allowed to call it WinPho now?), Google Android, Palm Pre, and Nokia. Even these implementations are likely to only ship in 2010.

And the iPhone version? According to Anup Murarka, director of partner development and technology (via Macworld):

“We’ve made a lot of progress, but there is still a lot of engineering work to be done. [...] We’re working with Apple on what we have. We’re committed to make the Flash plug-in work on the iPhone.”

Analysts aren't so sure, citing lack of low-level system access on the iPhone (and BlackBerry) as limitations, as well as Apple's preference for their own QuickTime technology.

So, if no news is good news, not much news must be... what exactly then?